Women’s participation in leadership
circles in Canadian politics has moved beyond "firsts" of various
sorts. This is perhaps especially true at the provincial level, yet at this
point there has been insufficient study of women holding elite positions.
Attention has more often focused on the federal level, and on legislative
rather than executive positions. The article, which examines patterns of
women’s roles in the cabinets of the provinces at three-year intervals over an
18-year period, from 1976 to 1994, presents some general conclusions about the
process in Canada.

At the time this article was
written Gary Moncrief was Professor of Political Science at Boise State
University and Donley Studlar was Professor of Political Science at West
Virginia University.

Across Canada women held only seven
cabinet positions in 1976; by 1994, they held 38. Female ministers increased
from less than four percent to almost 21 percent of the membership of the ten
provincial cabinets over this period. There was a noticeable upward surge in
both legislative seats and portfolios held by women between 1985 and 1988.
Interestingly, except for 1985, women held a slightly greater share of cabinet
posts than legislative seats; in other words, women were slightly better
represented in cabinet than in the legislative assembly as a whole.

However, since ministers are drawn
from the governing party, it is useful to examine the trends in terms of the
percentage of women from the governing party who hold portfolios. The
proportion of women in the governing party who hold a position in cabinet is
generally higher than is the case for men (1985 is again the exception). Over
time, the proportion of women in the governing party who hold portfolios has
actually declined slightly. However, this is largely due to the fact that the
number of cabinet ministers has declined. In 1976 there were 186 cabinet
positions in the ten provincial governments; by 1985 that number had increased
to 225. But the overall number of cabinet ministers in 1994 was only 182,
indicating an era of leaner cabinets. Thus, women are holding their own in
terms of the number of ministerial offices, compared to their ranks in the
legislative majorities.

Are there discernible patterns of
women ministers by province or party? In regard to the first of these, numbers
are not as relevant as percentages since smaller provinces tend to have fewer
people in cabinet than larger ones. In the first year of our study, 1976, half
of the provinces (Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Manitoba and
Saskatchewan) had no women in the cabinet. In four of the seven years examined,
Ontario had the highest percentage of women cabinet ministers. In general, the
Atlantic provinces have trailed the rest of the country in placing women in
political executive positions, which corresponds to a similar deficit of women
in their legislatures1.

By 1994, the provinces averaged 20
percent women in cabinet, led by the New Democratic governments of Ontario (37
percent), British Columbia (32 percent), and Saskatchewan (22 percent). Although
Prince Edward Island, led by the first elected woman provincial premier,
Catherine Callbeck, was right on the overall average in 1994, the other
Atlantic provinces were the three lowest, ranging from 6.7 percent
(Newfoundland) to 15 percent (New Brunswick). Saskatchewan in 1991 under the
Progressive Conservatives was possibly the last ever provincial government in
Canada to be without a woman in the cabinet.

Table 1

Percentage of Female Cabinet Ministers, by Year, Province and Party

1976

1979

1982

1985

1988

1991

1995

Alberta

4.17

PC

3.45

PC

8.00

PC

6.67

PC

15.38

PC

11.11

PC

17.65

PC

British
Columbia

6.67

SC

6.25

SC

5.00

SC

5.26

SC

12.50

SC

10.00

SC

31.58

NDP

Manitoba

0

NDP

6.67

PC

16.67

NDP

10.53

NDP

15.79

NDP

11.11

PC

18.67

PC

New
Brunswick

0

PC

10.53

PC

13.04

PC

9.52

PC

14.29

LIB

17.39

LIB

15.00

LIB

Newfoundland

0

PC

11.76

PC

11.11

PC

10.53

PC

5.00

PC

6.67

LIB

6.67

LIB

Nova Scotia

0

0

0

0

4.76

5.88

11.76

PC

PC

PC

PC

PC

PC

Lib

Ontario

11.54

PC

8.00

PC

6.90

PC

6.06

PC

20.00

LIB

44.44

NDP

37.04

NDP

Prince Edward Island

10-0

LIB

0

PC

10.0

PC

10.0

PC

9.09

LIB

18.18

LIB

20.00

LIB

Quebec

3.85

LIB

7.69

PQ

8.00

PQ

3.57

PQ

14.29

LIB

20.00

LIB

19.05

LIB

Saskatchewan

0

NDP

0

NDP

12.50

PC

8.33

PC

6.25

PC

0

PC

22.22

NDP

Is party, rather than province or region,
the key to understanding where women will obtain ministerial positions? As
noted above, the recent performance of NDP governments in promoting women into
cabinets is impressive. Yet in the late 1970s there were NDP governments
without women in the cabinet. Since then, the NDP has been the most active
party in advancing women, but the Liberals are a close second overall. This
should not obscure the fact that all parties, including Social Credit in
British Columbia and the Parti Québécois as well as the Progressive
Conservatives, have appointed more women to ministerial positions in the
provinces they have controlled, especially since 1985.

What about the qualifications of
the women ministers themselves? These are hard to assess. Data on legislative
experience indicates that women in the governing party holding portfolios have
had longer tenures in the legislature, compared to women without portfolios
(5.1 years versus 3.8), but the difference has shrunk over the years as more
women have been elected to and stayed in the legislature.

Even if women have been achieving
appointment to more cabinet positions, which positions are they? In the days
when women ministers were few, they were often limited to so-called
"women’s positions", including culture, education, social services,
and consumer affairs2, leaving not only the premiership but also
major financial and legal positions reserved for men. Has this changed in the
Canadian provinces over the years?

The second table groups the variety
of cabinet positions into 16 categories, both overall and in two time periods,
reflecting the surge of women’s appointments after 1985. Although women are
still confined to traditional "women’s ministries" (the first six) to
some degree, increasingly they have been appointed to a more diverse set of
offices. Overall, women held 60.2 percent traditional positions, but this
dropped from 74.6 percent in the first decade to 53.3 percent in the second.
The drop in several traditional categories has been counteracted somewhat by women’s
increase in women/family positions, as more of the latter ministries have been
created recently. Altogether, women’s opportunities to serve in ministerial
offices, even the most powerful ones, no longer are as limited as they were
only a few years ago.

Table II

Distribution of Portfolios

Type of Portfolios Held By Women Cabinet
Ministers

Type
of Portfolio

%
All Years

%
1976-1985

%
1988-1994

Women/Family

10.5

5.1

13.1

Culture

7.2

8.5

6.6

Consumer/Corporate
Affairs

6.1

8.5

4.9

Health/Welfare

21.0

27.1

18.0

Education

12.1

22.0

7.4

Environment

3.3

3.4

3.3

Infrastructure/Administration

5.0

8.5

3.3

Économicse/Finances

5.5

3.4

6.6

Intergovernmental
Relations

5.0

1.7

6.6

Extractive
Resources

3.9

O

5.7

Justice

2.2

O

3.3

Premier

1.1

O

1.6

Liquor/Lottery

1.1

O

1.6

Deputy
Prime Minister

7.7

5.1

9.0

Labour

4.4

6.8

3.3

Minority
Issues

3.9

0

5.7

Total

100.0

100.0

100.0

When we combined several of these
variables with others in a statistical analysis, the percentage of women in the
governing legislative party turned out to be the most important factor affecting
the percentage of women’s cabinet appointment. The percentage of women in the
majority party, however, was highly correlated with the overall percentage of
women in the legislature.

In short, in the Canadian
parliamentary/cabinet system, the most important factors in getting women into
provincial cabinets are having women nominated for winable legislative seats
and then having a party with a large percentage of women legislators form the
government. This has often meant the New Democratic Party or Liberal Party, but
there are notable exceptions. Perhaps because of its urbanized environment,
Ontario has done better than expected in appointing women to cabinet-level
positions3. The Ontario Progressive Conservative government, elected
in 1995, had 21 percent women in its first cabinet, the highest ever for a
Conservative administration in the provinces.

There has been little research on
women in executive positions in other democracies, but the major work that has
been done on women at the central level in European democracies shows one major
difference from these Canadian findings4. In countries with
coalition governments, it appears that the overall proportion of women in
parliament is a more important influence on women becoming cabinet ministers
than the share of women in the governing parties. The typical Canadian
single-party legislative majority, with disciplined parties, makes it more
straightforward to translate women’s legislative gains into executive offices.

In summary, women have secured an increased
share of cabinet offices in the Canadian provinces over the past two decades,
and in the process they have broken out of the traditional women’s positions to
which they had previously been confined. In the aggregate, women now have
accumulated substantial experience in a variety of executive positions, which
augurs well for continued advance in both positions and policy impact in the
future, in all regions of the country and under governments of various
political stripes5.

Notes

1. Donley T. Studlar and Richard E.
Matland, "The Dynamics of Women’s Representation in the Canadian
Provinces, 1975-1994", Canadian Journal of Political Science, Vol.
29 (1996) pp. 269-293.